Light dark photon and fermionic dark radiation for the Hubble constant and the structure formation

P. Ko, Yong Tang
2016 Physics Letters B  
Motivated by the tensions in the Hubble constant H_0 and the structure growth σ_8 between Planck results and other low redshift measurements, we discuss some cosmological effects of a dark sector model in which dark matter (DM) interacts with fermionic dark radiation (DR) through a light gauge boson (dark photon). Such kind of models are very generic in particle physics with a dark sector with dark gauge symmetries. The effective number of neutrinos is increased by δ N_eff∼ 0.5 due to light
more » ... photon and fermionic DR, thereby resolving the conflicts in H_0. The elastic scattering between DM and DR induces suppression for DM's density perturbation, but without acoustic oscillations. For weakly-interacting DM around 100GeV, the new gauge coupling should be ∼ 10^-4 to have sizable effect on matter power spectrum in order to relax the tension in σ_8.
doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2016.10.001 fatcat:lpbghbt7j5bofgixc6l5sfvivy